Why I'm Pessimistic

I was watching the National Geographic Channel the other night. An episode of the series "Wild" was on, showcasing the behavior of hippos in Africa. It was very interesting--for example, they shoed that researchers communicate via sound underwater much like whales. Here is where the problem was: they showed that in time of hunger, hippos become omnivours and will eat other animals including their own. They can also kill each other during territorial disputes, frequently when a dominant male invades a territory and if successful, then kills the cubs of the other males. Another example was hippos attacking, but not eating, humans who were trespassing on their territory. Now this in itself is not the problem, even though the narrator referred to these behaviors as "the dark side" of hippos. The problem is with the commentary! These are not "dark side" behaviors at all. They're simply natural reactions of a species to peticular circumstances in its environment. If the National Geographic Channel is putting these behaviors in human terms--as if somehow ours is better--then perhaps they should have pointed out what happens when humans have terriotorial disputes: war, murder, rape, etc. I recall the same kind of commentary about elephants who would sometimes rampage through villages in India.

Secondly, the other problem with the channel is some of its shows, such as "The Dog Whisperer" and "Is it Real?". What are these shows doing on the National Geographic Channel? I think a better place would be Animal Planet and Fox, respectively. We don't need any more shows about UFOs. How about a program about other cultures around the world, or interesting behaviors of other species? That's in part what the National Geographic Magazine is about, and I love it. Obviously they decided to make the channel more sensational to get higher ratings. But couldn't have they kept their format similar to their magazine and still attracted a wide audience?

One last final piece of information: the magazine actually made a huge mistake by actually bringing up the nature vs. nurture debate in an article about dragonflies. Researchers, according to the author, were surprised to find that dragonflies learned the color of other dragonflies as they were growing up, meaning that it was "learning and not genetic". The problem with this statement is that all behavior of any living species, including learning, is genetic. Everything we or anyone else does is genetic: every behavior is programmed in our DNA and is limited to a range. For example, with intensive training, I may be able to learn to play the piano. But no matter how much I study, I know I can never be as good as many other musicians. Ever since humans began to domesticate animals, they must have known that animals learn. Over 150 years ago Charles Darwin wrote in the Voyage of the Beagle during a stay in South America that cattle are able to recognize each individual out of thousands, and later wrote about how all species are connected to each other in The Origin of Species.

My point about this characterization, and my earlier ranting about the television channel, is that we still look at the world as us vs. others, i.e., we rule the planet and everything else is a sidenote. Even though we are intellectually superior to any other species, we don't rule the world. There are actually some species, such as ants and mosquitoes, that are more successful numerically than we are. If an asteroid similar in size to the one that caused the extinction of the dinasours hits the earth again, most, if not all of us won't make it. But guess who will: ants and mosquitoes (among other species). Hopefully that won't happen anytime soon, but it shows that even humans can't control all events and we're part of the Universe just like everything else.

I'm pessimistic because if National Geographic, almost 150 after Darwin published The Origin of Species and over 25 years since Edwin Wilson published Sociobiology, can't get things right and encourages looking at everything from the human point of view, we can't hope to make people understand that our behavior is leading to the destruction of thousands of species. [Perhaps that's a bit too harsh: the National Geographic Magazine does a great job of education others about other species and I can only point to that one mistake; I still stand by my view of the National Geographic Channel]. I'm not referring to global warming but to constant human territorial expansion that is leaving less and less for others (see Genesis Theory for more information).